conversion effectiveness of ECUSA

[srigdon]

We've all heard about ECUSA's declining numbers. And I agree its liberal leaning are partly to account for that. But it's obvious that - given that so many younger Episcopalians ditch church after high school, that our membership must be substantially people who came from elsewhere. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if half my parish weren't born Anglican.

So, for all its demographic problems, I wonder if a case could be made that actually ECUSA has a substantial conversion ability - which just happens to be more than offset by its failure to properly brainwash its kids that they will go to hell for skipping church on Sunday.

Is anybody aware of statistics backing up my supposition? For all the (ill-informed) talk about Mormons growing, for example, they lose 70-80 percent of converts. There's no way ECUSA is that high.

[alan1803]

I think this is very much an American thing, reflecting the absence of a default "established" church. You have a "free market" paradigm of religion. (I use "established" in scare quotes, because France certainly has no formal establishment, and a robustly secular separation of church and state, but if a French person is a Christian, s/he is assumed, absent other info, to be a Roman Catholic.)

It would be interesting to know what was the original denomination of people who become Episcopalians in the USA, and what attarcts them to that denomination.

[anglicansablaze]

It depends upon what you mean by "conversion". One informal study suggests that the young people who leave the Episcopal Church fall into two groups - those who do not believe in Jesus Christ and see no need for any kind of religion. This first group forms more than half of the young people who attend the Episcopal Church with their parents until they decide to stop attending in their adolescence. The second group is made up of those who come to faith in Jesus Christ in the Episcopal Church and then move on to a more evangelical church.

The Episcopal Church may attract some people who prefer a more liberal church. This is the "circulation of the saints", the migration of self-identified "Christians" from one church to another. People move from church to church for various reasons. A number of these reasons have no real connection with religion. In the consumer-driven society of the United States this is not an uncommon phenomena. However, I would not confuse this process with conversion which is the process of moving from disbelief to faith in Jesus Christ and to a committed, functional, mature discipleship. According to the same study the Episcopal Church does an inordinately poor job of helping people to connect with Christ and of growing as followers of Christ.

Five months ago I relocated to western Kentucky. Here the Episcopal Church is doing an abyssmal job of reaching the unchurched - of helping people make the transition from unbelief to belief, from seeking to discipleship. The only self-supporting church is Grace in Paducah. The four other churches are missions. Two of the churches - St. Peter's in Hickman and Trinity in Fulton - are more preaching stations than missions. They were established in the 1840s. I do not know whether they have ever been self-supporting. St. Martin's in the Fields in Mayfield was closed last year and its dwindling congregation merged with that of St. John's. St. John's was established in 1956. It has never been self-supporting. St. Peter's by the Lakes in Gilbertsville, founded in 1970, experienced a split in 2003. Part of the congregation left over the Robinson consecration and formed St. Mark's Anglican Church, a APCK affiliate. (St. Marki's is struggling too.) A number of factors account for the state of the Episcopal Church in the region. However, I do not have time to address them in this post.